The long-term effect of wake-on LAN / sleep cycles on longevity of hard-disks

[MrJim]

I've read that repeatedly letting hard-disks enter a power-down sleep state & then awakening them can have a negative effect on their MTBF. Does anyone have any information about this? I'm really thinking about a domestic NAS environment rather than server farms etc... Basically, I'd like to be 'green' & save a bit of power, but not if my hard-disks will wear out the day after their warranty expires

[smargh]

I don't have a link to any studies, but if I may use a car analogy: ignore the battery aspect of a car - assume it's a perfect battery. I would not want to stop & start my car hundreds of times a day. I doubt it would be good for it.

For the sake of 20p per month or so, just leave them running all the time. It's only something like 4 or 5 watts per drive. I'm sure someone can do some real-world power savings calculations.

[AETAaAS]

Not worth the power savings (which may only be a couple pounds every few months (if even that, given how efficient drives are these days) if you lose your data and your drive. It is better to leave a drive running; spinning up is taxing and can wear drives but may be balanced on your use. Given you want it for a NAS, which probably means many different devices using it at any time of the day, it is better to have it running than to let it spin up and down constantly.

I understand you want to be green, but its not worth it. And do NOT buy WD Greens, get Red or a Hitachi Ultrastar. I have only ever had one drive fail on me in over 10 years and it was a WD Green.

Extra reading...
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.a...pgno=2#myth-14
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2184889

[DanceswithUnix]

I don't have a link to any studies, but if I may use a car analogy: ignore the battery aspect of a car - assume it's a perfect battery. I would not want to stop & start my car hundreds of times a day. I doubt it would be good for it.

For the sake of 20p per month or so, just leave them running all the time. It's only something like 4 or 5 watts per drive. I'm sure someone can do some real-world power savings calculations.

Interesting analogy, if you buy a car with "stop-start" so it cuts the engine every time you stop at traffic lights? It's designed to do that

It *used* to be the case that starting a drive was bad for it, but modern drives seem better at parking the heads than they were years ago.

OTOH, cheap drives might wear their bearings out if you leave them going all the time.

Get a drive with a decent warranty, and use it the way you want. Noise and heat would be a bigger concern for me at home than longevity.

[Lil-Diabo]

I've wondered about this, I often hear my sky box hard drive spin up even while it's off...
I recently noticed that my external drive on my PC doesn't power down when I shut down my PC (Probably has something to do with the USB charger "software")
Wonder if I should start unplugging it and only plugging it back in when in use :/

[DanceswithUnix]

Stumbled across this from Seagate:

http://www.seagate.com/files/staticf.../100686584.pdf

50000 start/stop cycles allowed. So if it starts and stops 10 times a day, you can expect a Seagate to last ~14 years, but if it spins down 100 times a day you get a year and a few months out of it. So don't spin down every quarter of an hour.

[MrJim]

I understand you want to be green, but its not worth it. And do NOT buy WD Greens, get Red or a Hitachi Ultrastar. I have only ever had one drive fail on me in over 10 years and it was a WD Green.

Thanks for all the info - you've basically confirmed my own thoughts Oh, & I went for a brace of 3TB WD Reds...quite quiet, & no problems so far